In 1959, Virginia's Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than obey a court order to desegregate. For five years, black children were left to fend for themselves while the courts decided if the county could continue to deny its citizens public education. Investigating this remarkable and nearly forgotten story of local, state, and…

While US parents have historically played supporting roles in schooling, they are becoming increasingly involved in education advocacy and policy. Contemporary school reform requires political muscle to enact controversial changes, meaning entrenched interest groups such as teachers unions have traditionally enjoyed an outsized impact in the realm…

School districts have two general courses of action to maintain fiscal solvency and raise student achievement in the face of drastic funding cuts. They can reduce spending on teachers, a strategy opposed by many teachers' unions because it threatens teacher job security. They can also cut expenditures in other areas such as instructional…

According to the literature, school districts are becoming increasingly political and complex. For superintendents to be successful in this environment they must exhibit great political skills in order to maintain positive working relationships with their boards of education. Thus, this study aimed to identify political skills that superintendents…

This dissertation employs data collected from multiple sites in Southern California over a period of nine months. Several in-depth ethnographic interviews and participant observations were conducted with Pakistani Muslim women (age 17-22) and their parents in an effort to better understand the influence that parents and ethno-religious communities…

The National Assessment Governing Board, recognizing that National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report releases were not conveying a sense of urgency, began an initiative in May 2010 to see what the Board could do to "make a difference" in fostering concern and action about the need to improve achievement and reduce…

The long awaited and hotly debated "disruption" of public education may finally have begun. Technology, the force that has transformed one industry after another, from the industrial revolution through the information age, is on the cusp of reshaping schools fundamentally. This is heady talk. Historically, schools have been quite adept…

In this essay Sarah Galloway considers emancipation as a purpose for education through examining the theories of Paulo Freire and Jacques Ranciere. Both theorists are concerned with the prospect of distinguishing between education that might socialize people into what is taken to be an inherently oppressive society and education with emancipation…

Consistent with other sciences (e.g., Kass-Simon, 1993; Tang, 2006), the field of kinesiology has been called a "masculine domain," which has an institutionalized culture biased against women (Brackenridge, Mutrie, & Choi, 2005). This paper represents the second part of a larger project that examined the life histories of eight trailblazing women…

This case describes initial conflicts experienced by a new superintendent that involve faculty resistance and diminished academic expectations at the high school, compared with the district's other schools. Compounding the situation is the fact that the Board of Education was bitterly divided when reaching their superintendent hiring decision,…

This paper attempts to add to the multifaceted discussion concerning neoliberalism and globalization out of two Cultural Studies of Science Education journal issues along with the recent Journal of Research in Science Teaching devoted to these topics. However, confronting the phenomena of globalization and neoliberalism will demand greater…

The increased demographic presence of Latino individuals has gradually resulted in growing political influence and representation. This growing presence and influence has altered the American political landscape, drawing sudden attention among scholars, the media, and political pundits. This article investigates four aspects of the growing…

This qualitative case study presents the reasons of teachers' job dissatisfaction in the government educational institutes in Pakistan. This case study is based on the two factor theory of Herzberg. The results of this case study reveal four core factors that cause job dissatisfaction among teachers in the public sector universities in developing…

This text deals with a problem concerning processes of the productive power of knowledge. We draw on the so-called poststructural theories challenging the classical image of thought--as hinged upon a representational logic identifying entities in a rigid sense--when formulating a problem concerning the gap between knowledge and the object of…

In his essay "Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us," Jim Garrison (2012, in this issue) restates Dewey's call "to educate individuals capable of criticizing and recreating society--not simply reproducing the status quo." He writes that under the new structural feudalism, "schools assume the…